ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Technology from the ’60s is preserving the Rio Grande today. A water quality structure situated about a half mile from the river helps keep trash and debris out.

“If you can imagine University stadium, about a foot and a half deep with trash, that’s what we haul out of here every year,” said Willie West, real estate manager with AMAFCA.

The North Diversion Channel Outflow handles whatever comes from the drains in the area north of Central, to the Sandia Pueblo, and the top of the Sandias.

“The facility was built to take that water, slow it down, and allow all that trash or most of that trash to fall out before it reaches the Rio Grande,” West said.

West says that this week we saw the “first flush.” Trash and debris are leftover from the metro’s first sizable storm last weekend.

“The storm we had eight or nine days ago pushed all the debris that had been collecting up for since winter,” West said.

The trash includes red solo cups, plastic bottles, household trash, lawn waste, and hypodermic needles. There are also shopping carts.

“We’ll pull out of this, oh in the next month or so, probably 100, 150 of them,” West said.

That’s where the manpower comes in.

“When the water levels get low enough, we can bring large equipment in here and remove sediment and debris,” West said. “Unfortunately, everything from here to the river, which is about a half a mile, that has to be done by hand.”

Without the structure and hands on deck, the quality of the river water would go way down.

“The Isleta Pueblo and others that rely on the river would have a huge flush of debris into that water and it would become unusable,” West said.

Leaders say a lot of that trash could be avoided if people stopped littering. AMAFCA has plans for the next five to ten years to add water quality structures throughout the city – and maintain the maintenance on the existing system.